[HN Gopher] Kagi Assistant is now available to all users
___________________________________________________________________
Kagi Assistant is now available to all users
Author : angilr
Score : 457 points
Date : 2025-04-18 04:12 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.kagi.com)
| viraptor wrote:
| If the staff sees this - please stop preventing zoom. Not only is
| that bad for accessibility, it makes the article less useful for
| everyone - there's a screenshot included showing off the feature,
| but it's too small to read on the phone and I can't zoom in.
| scary-size wrote:
| I can zoom just fine on mobile Safari.
| PKop wrote:
| So what?
|
| His complaint is easily verifiable, and valid:
|
| <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-
| scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=0">
| aitchnyu wrote:
| I jumped on this bandwagon long back for preventing
| horizontal scrollbars and other issues. Is there an updated
| advice for allowing zoom and being responsive?
| ericrallen wrote:
| "Allowing zoom" and "being responsive" are not two states
| at odds with one another.
|
| Preventing zooming is a serious accessibility issue and
| it makes the content worse for every user.
|
| If you're properly setting responsive widths, a large
| enough base font size, large enough input text size, and
| using border-box for box-sizing, things should just work
| except for cases where you're absolutely positioning
| things or telling them not to word wrap and they are
| wider than the viewport.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| There really is no bandwagon to jump onto here--most
| sites don't prevent zooming in. Many that do were just
| misconfigured from the start, and because _some_ popular
| mobile browsers ignore `maximum-scale=1.0`, the issue
| isn't normally identified.
|
| Quick tip: Make sure all of your inputs are at least 16px
| font size. This will prevent most mobile browsers from
| "automatically" zooming in when an input is focused ;)
| Which is a common reason people employ the maximum-scale
| property.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| I can zoom in
|
| Android 14 Firefox 136.0.1 (Build #2016078447),
| hg-e7956a4db6c5+ GV: 136.0.1-20250310180126 AS: 136.0
|
| ublock origin enable zoom in all websites
|
| Edit: I know this is not what you are asking for, but try
| opening the image in a new tab. Can you zoom in there?
|
| https://kagifeedback.org/assets/files/2025-04-17/1744906741-...
| viraptor wrote:
| Yeah, I know the workarounds. This is more of a "complain
| publicly to maybe fix this specific case, but mostly raise
| awareness for people who will build the next thing".
| dean2432 wrote:
| This has been bugging me as well.
| Hasnep wrote:
| Firefox on Android has an accessibility setting called "Zoom on
| all web sites" that gets around this. Firefox's reader mode
| would help with this as well.
|
| It's a shame we need these workarounds instead of all websites
| being accessible by default :/
| cma wrote:
| The original android browser had something much better, zoom
| until the size was right, double tap to reflow to fit
| onli wrote:
| The new one has an extension that reflows on zoom.
| https://github.com/emvaized/text-reflow-on-zoom-mobile, it
| is quite useful.
| cma wrote:
| Nice, I wouldn't want it to be automatic after pinch but
| that looks promising and I'm sure could be modded, maybe
| pinch zoom and then if you keep holding the two fingers
| without moving much for X amount of time it reflows
| onli wrote:
| Yeah, it is sometime annoying when text reflows if you
| only want to look closer at an image. But most of the
| time it's not really an issue, you just need to
| reposition. Maybe give it a try anyway :)
| jakub_g wrote:
| Opera Android does support reflowing.
| viraptor wrote:
| That's amazing! I'm already on FF on Android and didn't
| realise they introduced it. Thank you so much. I'll finally
| be able to see the small images on medium and substack!
| kevincox wrote:
| Unfortunately there is no per-site override. So you get to
| the occasional site that you don't want to zoom (like a game
| where the zoom gesture does something in-game) that is
| unusable with this global setting enabled :(
| GrayShade wrote:
| You can open it in a new tab and zoom there.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| What browser prevents this actually? None of the browsers (even
| mobile) I just quickly tested just... worked? No extensions.
| jddj wrote:
| I think Safari just outright ignores the maximum-scale
| property.
| freediver wrote:
| I can look into it. Can you clarify what you mean? Article
| zooms in normally for me (Orion browser/iOS).
| ilt wrote:
| OP might have meant that pinch and zoom is locked in and
| that's why they can't zoom into that screenshot?
|
| Edit: I can zoom in perfectly in my browser - Safari on
| iPhone - here.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's blocked on Firefox on Android. Another comment quoted
| the meta tag which disables it.
| freediver wrote:
| Got it. For some reason Bear Blog defaults to this setting,
| not easy to change from dashboard it seems.
| viraptor wrote:
| Awesome, thanks for checking it!
| setsewerd wrote:
| Not sure if you mean you work at Kagi, but I also want to add
| that when opening the Android app, the splash page takes a
| full second or so to load before the search bar opens, which
| doesn't sound like much but it makes it harder to habitually
| use Kagi as my default mobile search.
|
| The Kagi widget technically solves this, but without
| installing a new launcher I can't replace the native Google
| search bar with the Kagi one.
| seth_at_kagi wrote:
| Hey - One of our engineers has fixed this. Please try again!
| jacobwinters wrote:
| Kagi employee here. I hate it when sites block zooming. Didn't
| realize our blog was doing it :S
|
| Our site's been fixed, and I opened a PR upstream.
| blissofbeing wrote:
| It would be nice if all models where available on every plan too.
| shinryuu wrote:
| Second that. Given that they have their fair use policy it
| should be in their interest as well I would believe since they
| have a baked in margin.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That would eliminate the one differentiating feature on the
| (presumably) highest margin plan they have.
|
| Moving to a pay-as-you-go model across all their plans might be
| interesting, but could equally give the wrong impression to
| some audiences given that it's a pricing strategy usually
| reserved for budget brands in the consumer space and tends to
| scare people off.
| jjmarr wrote:
| If you try openrouter you'll see why they have to charge
| $25/month for the best models. Pay per use and you'll
| intuitively feel the price.
| Valodim wrote:
| They give more for free, and your only thought is "sure would
| be nice if they gave even more for free"?
| maronato wrote:
| Honestly, everything should be free, and they could just make
| money from ads (which I'd block with my ad blocker).
|
| /s
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _would be nice if all models where available on every plan
| too_
|
| Would be nice if I had a lay-flat intercontinental jet.
| C4stor wrote:
| The "fair use" part takes a lot of place in this article.
|
| It talks a lot about what happens if you use more tokens than
| what you're allowed, but curiously doesn't pip a word about what
| happens if you use less - for example maybe with a partial rebate
| on your next billing cycle ?
|
| I think "fair" should mean "fair for all parties involved",
| currently it's rather a "we don't want to incur any risk" policy,
| since I don't see how it's fair for my end of the contract. I'd
| rather pay for my actual usage at any other provider than pay for
| min(actual usage, 25$) at Kagi.
| jen729w wrote:
| As an existing happy subscriber to Kagi, this statement is
| illogical.
|
| I currently pay for x. Soon I'll get x + y for the same money.
|
| That's better.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| "As an existing happy subscriber" -- goodness! Even after
| years of seeing what happens after such illogical evangelism,
| hn never ceases to surprise you and brings the fandom out in
| full force. It's like with Apple. You say once "your phone
| switches on and off on its own - maybe something is amiss
| with the hw/sw" and there are dozens of replies already
| blaming you "you must be holding it wrong!". It's a whole new
| level of apologism.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| I don't follow what either you or the OP are upset about.
| Where is the apologism and why do you think it's needed?
|
| Kagi rolled out a free feature to its existing customers
| without increasing the price of their plans. The limits of
| that plan seem quite generous, as well. The only way I can
| make sense of the OP's post is that the OP wants the Kagi
| subscription price to decrease. Perhaps that's fair, but it
| doesn't make any sense here because you're strictly getting
| more for your money. If you're paying $10/month for a
| subscription, yesterday you couldn't use Assistant and
| today you can for the same $10/month. Placing a cap on how
| much you can use seems quite reasonable given the service
| costs money to operate. If you choose not use it, you're no
| worse than you were yesterday... you can happily go about
| using the search service you were already paying for.
|
| Is the problem that the free usage isn't unlimited? Is it
| that not using the free service doesn't reduce the search
| price? Or is it that those using Assistant more than you
| appear to be getting more value for their money? I'm not
| trying to be dense, but I really don't see what's even
| remotely controversial about this announcement.
|
| Lately, every subscription I have is increasing the fee
| without giving me anything. Kagi is giving me something
| extra without charging me any more money. I'm sure the
| nefarious intention is to make their service more
| attractive to non-subscribers and grow their userbase, but
| interests can align.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I am also an existing happy subscriber to Kagi. I currently
| pay for unlimited X. Now I pay for limited X, where I can't
| even see if I'm approaching limits or not. Anyway, my main
| point is that I'm getting LESS for the same money.
| eitland wrote:
| Search isn't getting limited is it?
|
| And the GPT features always had some limits.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I'm not paying for search, I'm paying for Unlimited
| Assistant. No, they did not "have some limits". Or at
| least, the product they sold me was very clearly labelled
| "Unlimited". The word "Unlimited" is literally in the
| name, and it was described as such in more wordly
| descriptions.
| mkayokay wrote:
| Maybe your usage might not be affected, I propose to
| check for a month and if it really goes over the limit,
| you have the option of canceling the subscription.
|
| It definitely is worded in a way that it can either be
| interpreted as (unlimited searches and unlimited premium
| ai) or (unlimited searches and premium ai).
|
| It also may not help that they did not enforce the fair
| use policy until now. At least that is what I read out of
| their blog post.
|
| But the fair use policy has been included a long time. I
| checked 2023-12-25 and found it there, might be available
| earlier, but no interest in looking harder.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| They advertise with the phrase "Unlimited Kagi
| Assistant", so I'm not sure how you can interpret that as
| "unlimited searches and premium ai". Kagi Assistant
| refers to the same thing as "ai" here. It's a different
| product than Search.
| II2II wrote:
| I'm not going to argue about your interpretation of the
| word _unlimited_ and wish that its use was either banned
| or strictly enforced in this (and similar) contexts. That
| said, until accountability is legislated and enforced, it
| is not reasonable to assume that unlimited means
| unlimited. Just as marketing abuses the word, customers
| abuse the concept. That 's especially true in a domain
| where processes can be automated and distributed, by some
| means or others.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > it is not reasonable to assume that unlimited means
| unlimited
|
| sure, but I am not abusing the unlimited plan. it is
| reasonable to assume that "unlimited" means that a normal
| user like myself will not run into limits.
| maronato wrote:
| If you're not abusing it and are just using it like a
| normal user, you won't hit the limit.
|
| As far as you're concerned, nothing will change, so I'm
| not sure why you think this is bad for you.
| VHRanger wrote:
| That policy is there because some users were incurring
| >$500 in AI costs in ultimate.
|
| Out of tens of thousands of users, the top 100 were using
| 48% of total AI costs.
|
| Kagi is bootstrapped, it can't just hemorrhage money like
| this the way the VC-subsidized AI startups do
| tempest_ wrote:
| That is totally unsurprising. I would be curious to see
| what they are doing to achieve that. Likely automating
| something and not using it like a typical human would.
| Phenomenit wrote:
| Yeah I concur.
|
| As an early adopter I first got forced off my grandfather plan
| to the regular one(at least I got a T-shirt). Now I have a
| limited number of searches that I have to keep track of and
| this has made me only use Kagi if necessary. This has dropped
| my number of searches significantly but at the end of the year
| I'm still being charged for renewing my plan even though I
| haven't used a quarter of my allotted searches.
|
| I don't care about LLMs so this brings nothing of value to me.
| Give me an email account or some backup storage and open source
| office suite and I would be willing to pay and pay more.
|
| I'm seriously considering not re-newing my subscription for the
| first time in ages.
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| The $10 plan has unlimited searches again.
| zargon wrote:
| And this isn't anything that has changed recently. It's
| been unlimited since 2023.
| mdhen wrote:
| How do you use kagi and not know the basic plan has unlimited
| searches and has had it for ages?
| Phenomenit wrote:
| It doesn't, I use the starter plan, that's the lowest paid
| tie.
| SadTrombone wrote:
| The basic plan has 300 searches.
| mkayokay wrote:
| Then don't renew. Nobody is forcing you to pay for the
| service, and from what you wrote, it sounds like the service
| is not what you need/want (anymore).
| mediumsmart wrote:
| That is a fair point. Considering the alternatives and
| realities Kagi is way too cheap for the life improvement it
| provides.
| maronato wrote:
| It's the exact opposite. They are incurring a huge amount of
| risk with this.
|
| 6 hours ago most users didn't have access to this feature at
| all. Now we have $4-8 of raw token credits a month to use on a
| well-built feature.
|
| I'm paying $9 a month with the annual subscription, and it was
| worth it just for Search. Now they're giving me $17 worth of
| value for the same price.
|
| Their margins must be razor thin, and they're only able to
| offer this much value because they're counting on most people
| not using all credits. If everyone did, or if they gave
| rebates, they'd go out of business.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Probably a lot of subscribers that will never use it, like
| myself.
| eitland wrote:
| For myself at least I agreed to the original price.
|
| If more features are added and I don't use the but other
| people do, as long as the features I pay for stays, I'm
| happy.
| RichardLake wrote:
| The other point of view is that they are now forcing users to
| pay for both search and AI, even if they do not want to use
| or fund the development of the later. You used to be paying
| 9$ for search, now you are paying 9$ - x for search and an
| unknown amount for AI.
| zuzulo wrote:
| Is it fair enough to ask your favorite restaurant to lower the
| bill because you didn't eat the two last franch fries ?
| onli wrote:
| If it's a subscription and someone else can eat the fries, of
| course?
| nirvdrum wrote:
| Huh? The title of the blog post is "Kagi Assistant is now
| available to all users!". Their users are people paying for
| what up until now was just their search service. They're now
| rolling in Assistant as a value-add. Your subscription price
| didn't increase. You're strictly getting more for what you were
| already paying. If you don't use it all, you're no worse off
| than you were yesterday.
|
| If you want metered billing, there's no shortage of AI services
| that offer that option. Kagi even offers one by way of the
| FastGPT. You can also pay to use their search API if you don't
| think the subscription is worthwhile. You can cobble something
| together with Open WebUI pretty easily.
|
| I have Kagi Family plan for my household. I've been paying for
| the Ultimate upgrade for my account in order to access
| Assistant, but given how infrequently others in my family would
| use it, it never made sense to upgrade them. Still, it would
| have been convenient if they could occasionally access
| Assistant. And now they can. And my bill didn't increase. And
| they're being incredibly transparent about what the limits are
| and why they're there. I'm a really happy customer today.
| ericrallen wrote:
| It's probably worth noting that they do offer a refund of your
| subscription price if you don't perform searches in a given
| month, which is pretty much the opposite of how every other
| company with a subscription works.
|
| It wasn't a day one feature, so there's some chance that a
| thing like this could roll out.
|
| The article probably focuses on the overage because that's what
| most users are going to be concerned about.
|
| Few other companies seem to try to do things in the interests
| of their users and balance that against making enough money to
| keep existing.
|
| This feels a bit like manufactured outrage.
| m1keil wrote:
| Anyone used both Kagi assistant and perplexity and can share how
| was the experience?
| greatgib wrote:
| I don't use the Kagi assistant yet, just the kind of AI
| response in search results. But regarding perplexity, I'm a
| little bit disappointed.
|
| I started to use Perplexity like 1 or 1.5 years ago when it was
| really good in term of efficiency to find good results with an
| efficient interface, compared to chatgpt and co. But nowadays I
| find the assistant response to be not that good at all, with a
| lot of the links provided or the suggested follow up questions
| on the same quality as Google SEO top results or ads.
|
| Despite having the paid plan or Perplexity, most of the time I
| try a request there and then still go to chatgpt or mistral to
| ask the question again.
|
| For Kagi, when I use the in search ai response, it is mostly
| good directly.
| dabbz wrote:
| If you hit `a` in the search results page it'll take you to a
| chat interface to better grok the AI in a conversational
| format. Not exactly the same as perplexity still, but more
| ChatGPT akin. There's also a continue in assistant button at
| the bottom of the summary results to chat more with the
| query.
|
| You can also go straight to the view by visiting `/assistant`
| and typing your query in there.
|
| I still think preplexity has the AI search stuff down better,
| but getting both a "legacy style" search AND AI search, Kagi
| has better value to me imo.
| loehnsberg wrote:
| I use both but cancelled my Perplexity subscription.
|
| Kagi is the better version of Google search, especially if you
| learn how to use lenses, bangs, and all these features. Kagi
| Assistant is great if you're happy with basic no-frills chat,
| i.e. no usable voice input, no image gen, no canvas.
|
| Perplexity is not bad, but somewhat stuck in the middle between
| ChatGPT/Gemini and search. They provide sources for search
| results which are somewhat more spot-on than what I've seen
| elsewhere. For example it could find EV chargers with
| restaurants for a trip I made along a route, which ChatGPT,
| Gemini, Kagi Assist failed greatly).
|
| I found refining searches with Perplexity terse and it kept
| forgetting context once you started to reply. They have an AI
| generated news feed which lured me into more doom scrolling.
|
| Also, be aware that Perplexity free-tier may collect data about
| you, which Kagi does not.
|
| Tldr; Kagi is a superior search engine worth paying for.
| Perplexity seems good at queries that require context but quite
| expensive.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| Any suggestions for how you got your lenses, bangs, assistant
| set up the way you like? I recently subscribed to Kagi and
| feel like I don't really know how to get in the habit of
| really using all the features.
| notpushkin wrote:
| You can start by looking at
| https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard and adjusting
| domains that make sense to you. E.g. I have all Pinterest
| lowered, as well as w3schools.com as I prefer
| developer.mozilla.org (which I raised instead).
|
| For bangs I'm pretty sure the default ones might be enough
| - just use them! Some of my go-to bangs are !gh, !gm for
| Google Maps (Kagi Maps are sometimes not as good in Asia),
| !yt, !mdn, and !amo for addons.mozilla.org.
|
| I also have this redirect rule:
| ^(https://www\.nytimes\.com.*$)|https://archive.ph/2025/$1
|
| So that if an NYT article comes up in the results I can get
| a version without paywall directly. You can set it up in
| https://kagi.com/settings?p=redirects.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I just stumbled across cooked.wiki recently. It allows
| you to convert any bullshit online recipe to a no-frills
| ingredient list and instructions. I've only tested it a
| couple times and I know I'll rarely remember to use the
| shortcut (https://cooked.wiki/<recipe-url>). But setting
| it up as a redirect rule from search results might be the
| thing that pushes usability over the top.
| loehnsberg wrote:
| I did not customize bangs and the standard lenses are
| already useful. I have two custom lenses for travel and
| academic papers, each searching specific domains. What I
| meant is that you learn how to use them. What is there by
| default is already quite good, like !yf !yt !uk etc.
| Zambyte wrote:
| For redirects I like to create a rule to direct versioned
| sites (like documentation) to either "latest" or the
| version relevant to me. I also like to redirect sites to a
| more user friendly version when applicable (like reddit.com
| => old.reddit.com).
|
| If a site leaves me disgruntled when I visit it, I block
| it. If I find it too useful to block entirely (reddit) I
| lower it. I apply the inverse to sites I enjoy.
|
| I find there are certain sites that have built-in search
| that sucks. One such example is Dockerhub. In that case,
| when I want to search for a container on Dockerhub, it may
| be tempting to use the built-in !dh, but that is no good.
| Instead I favor the "snap" search: @dh, which will just add
| "site:hub.docker.com" to you query. This will give much
| better results than !dh. This can also be combined with the
| "I'm feeling lucky" bang (!), so you can search for
| something like "nats @dh !" and end up on the Dockerhub
| page for NATS - without ever even seeing Kagi if you do it
| from your URL bar. I do this pattern all the time, usually
| with Dockerhub and GitHub.
|
| You'll find with the above pattern that you'll start to
| want to apply this to sites that aren't natively supported
| as bangs. One such site for me has been Ollama. I added a
| !ollama to be able to search for models directly. It's also
| nice because just searching "!ollama" will bring me right
| to the homepage too, which is useful when I want to check
| to see if I'm on the latest version.
|
| You'll also find there are subjects where you tend to
| prefer a small set of sources. Maybe it's some software or
| tool, or some hobby or something, where you prefer official
| documentation, maybe some known personal sites you trust, a
| reddit community, something like that. That's where custom
| lenses comes in. I personally have a lens for the operating
| system I use (GNU Guix) (as well as a !p bang to search for
| packages) which includes official documentation, mailing
| list archives, IRC archives, things like that. I'm sure
| there are probably similar subjects in your world that you
| would enjoy having a more focused search for :)
|
| As for the Kagi Assistant, I pretty much have just wired up
| an Assistant to use my Guix lens as a search source. That
| is pretty nice, because I can just ask it general questions
| like "how do I install nginx?" and get focused and relevant
| answers, instead of having it go off on how to install it
| on irrelevant distros.
| spooneybarger wrote:
| I use both. I only pay for Kagi because I have many models I
| can use and I can set up different contexts to use them in.
|
| I rarely use Kagi search anymore and instead search via
| assistant. Both it and perplexity give me much better results
| than I get from a traditional search engine.
|
| I've never been great at getting what I want from search
| engines. With assistant and perplexity, I type plain English
| with context and get what I am looking for a large chunk of the
| time. That's a godsend to me.
|
| I've found things that assistant does that make it worth paying
| for. I often use perplexity but what I use it for (deep
| research) isn't valuable enough at the time to pay for.
|
| I like the perplexity iOS app a lot and use it almost
| exclusively on my phone which isn't enough use to necessitate
| needing a subscription.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Just typed this up elsewhere in the thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43726582
| m1keil wrote:
| Examples were useful to visualise the difference, thanks.
| mbesto wrote:
| I tried both and use Perplexity. Perplexity is much more akin
| to native ChatGPT in which I can create "spaces" for my
| projects. For example, I just bought an RV and so I loaded up
| all of the PDF manuals into a space so the LLM can reference
| those things. Since a few months ago, Kagi is just thread
| based.
|
| FYI - I use Kagi every day for standard search and love it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Perplexity aggressively makes shit up, particularly when it
| comes to science and finance. It provides sources, so you can
| check the bullshit, but I'm the error rate is so high that
| it's practically dangerous.
| colonial wrote:
| > A note on our fair-use policy
|
| > Basically our policy states that you can use AI models based on
| your plan's value.
|
| Although I likely won't use Assistant, stuff like this is why I
| love Kagi. My relationship with them as a customer feels
| refreshingly transparent; I can't think of any other consumer
| SaaS provider that automatically answers my reflexive "how does
| this make money?" question.
|
| (Compare, say, Discord. It's best in class, but eternally
| unprofitable - which makes me wary that it might fold or go to
| hell at the drop of a hat.)
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I've paid for a monthly subscription with Discord for years
|
| They also have ads in the app and they have other monetization
| features...
| colonial wrote:
| Revenue != profit. Discord, like almost every 2010s SaaS
| startup, has revenue (from your Nitro) - but not nearly
| enough to cover expenses.
| troupo wrote:
| > Revenue != profit
|
| And for over a decade most companies talk only about
| revenue, which is infuriating. Because most startups and
| tech darlings survive only by continuous infusion of
| unlimited investor money.
| inglor wrote:
| I worked for 4 startups that were operating for years at
| a loss with revenue, all are profitable today and all
| were acquired.
|
| My current startup is also not profitable, we're burning
| money but we're already signing big contracts and I hope
| in a year or two we keep growing rather than become
| profitable (1B+ valuation in a year).
|
| Becoming profitable, even at this point is just a matter
| of deciding to stop expanding - but neither us nor our
| investors want this given there is so much potential for
| growth and more revenue streams on the line.
|
| this is ycombinator's news aggregators, I suspect you're
| not going to get a "don't take risks and build things"
| vibe - it's a startup accelerator after all :).
| troupo wrote:
| > all are profitable today and all were acquired.
|
| They are either profitable or acquired :)
|
| > Becoming profitable, even at this point is just a
| matter of deciding to stop expanding
|
| Yeah, growth at all costs is one of the defining factors.
|
| > it's a startup accelerator after al
|
| The only business models for Y Combinator startups are:
|
| - run indefinitely long on unlimited investor money
|
| - get sold to the highest bidder at some nebulous market
| valuation
|
| Becoming profitable never enters the picture :)
| sebastiennight wrote:
| > They are either profitable or acquired :)
|
| Why? Once a company has been acquired, does it
| automatically fall out of profitability?
|
| If it's acquired in a stock sale, it remains an
| independent entity and still has a P&L
|
| If it's acquired/merged in an asset sale (not usually a
| good sign), it can still be assessed whether the new
| division is profitable - except in some rare cases like
| Google (allegedly!) not wanting to itemize some of their
| divisions to avoid too much regulatory scrutiny on
| monopoly positions.
|
| > Becoming profitable never enters the picture :)
|
| Seems very wrong based on looking at YC's portfolio,
| which apparently includes a bunch of profitable startups
| troupo wrote:
| > Once a company has been acquired, does it automatically
| fall out of profitability?
|
| It becomes a part of the company that bought it?
|
| > Seems very wrong based on looking at YC's portfolio,
| which apparently includes a bunch of profitable startups
|
| It contains very few profitable startups. Those are the
| exceptions.
| sebastiennight wrote:
| > It becomes a part of the company that bought it?
|
| Not necessarily. As I explained above, most successful
| acquisitions are stock sales, in which case the acquiring
| company now owns the startup (they hold the shares). The
| startup is still a separate entity at this point.
|
| Google is known for just merging the acquired startups
| into their product line (and/or killing them), but it's
| not a hard rule that all acquisitions are mergers.
|
| For example, AFAIK Livestream is still a subsidiary of
| Vimeo (ie wholly owned, but separate):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimeo_Livestream
|
| So Livestream can be profitable or not, separately from
| whether its acquirer is.
| lukas099 wrote:
| > most startups and tech darlings survive only by
| continuous infusion of unlimited investor money.
|
| Investors making long bets is a good thing, I'd argue.
| troupo wrote:
| The bets are invariably: sell to the highest bidder, exit
| through inflated IPO and/or speculative "market
| capitalization".
|
| There are a few outliers like "let's subsidize this price
| dumping until all competitors are dead and then we recoup
| money by being a de facto monopoly"
| 7bit wrote:
| Not enough to cover expenses? Do you understand what you're
| saying? That they're running a deficit for 15 years.
| Companies must make profit, or they vanish. They clearly
| make a profit, otherwise they would no longer exist.
| inglor wrote:
| They raise more capital and get more debt and try to
| lower burn rate but the original comment was talking
| about the 2010s mindset of "growth before profit" where
| you want more users/revenue to get acquired by a bigger
| player that can better monetize you.
|
| The fact Discord isn't profitable (and hasn't been) is
| well documented.
|
| Also, operating at a loss isn't necessarily bad (i.e. if
| you expand or spend more on R&D your profits shrink).
| Companies might choose to spend more on R&D and not be
| profitable (e.g. Amazon for a long time).
| sevg wrote:
| This is a big misconception (though not one I'm used to
| seeing in the HN crowd).
|
| Companies can operate at a deficit for many years without
| vanishing, usually because they have venture capital
| funding or investor backing.
| MrJohz wrote:
| I'm not a business person, so take this with a grain of
| salt, but my understanding is that this is common for a
| lot of smaller startups and tech companies.
|
| If you can raise funds outside of revenue (i.e. outside
| of directly selling your products), you can keep
| operating even if you're not actually generating any
| income directly. Typically that will be in the form of
| investment and loans. So even if your expenses (incl.
| repayments for outstanding loans etc) are higher than
| your revenue, you can stay in business as long as you can
| convince enough investors that it's still worth their
| while to give you their money.
|
| I don't know whether this is true for Discord
| specifically, but I understand it's a fairly common
| strategy, especially for companies where their best
| chance of success is by being the only player in a given
| market.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > Companies must make profit, or they vanish.
|
| Oh, buddy. That's how it's _supposed_ to work, but that
| is not how it works at all.
| an_guy wrote:
| What do you mean?
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| This is particularly an ironic comment given that this is
| the forum run by a company that invests in companies that
| are not yet profitable and are often not profitable for
| years if ever
| Zetaphor wrote:
| It took Uber 15 years to make their first profit
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-
| pro...
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| They are profitable
|
| And besides my point was that it's pretty clear what their
| monetization is and that it's not some mystery
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| > They are profitable
|
| Citation needed. With this type of company and business
| model, it's highly unusual to be profitable, so the
| burden of proof is on those who say it is.
| raphman wrote:
| They are apparently not profitable (yet):
|
| > Discord has raised a total of about $1 billion in
| funding. It has more than $700 million in cash on its
| balance sheet and the goal to become profitable this
| year, according to a person familiar with the matter.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034705/discord-
| layoffs-...
| basch wrote:
| The thing still giving me pause is a lack of "bring your own
| model connection" between saas uh services.
|
| If I already pay for Gemini Advanced (or OpenAI/ChagtGPT Pro),
| I then have to pay for it again at every service that offers a
| Pro 2.5 (or 4.1/4o) tier. I should be able to connect my Gemini
| Advanced access to any service that offers Flash and be able to
| upgrade. Signing up for a bunch of services is starting to feel
| like being triple, quadruple or more dipped. Similar to how I
| am annoyed seeing media content cross licensed to three
| streaming services and not getting a bill reduction when
| subscribed to multiple services with the same content.
| everforward wrote:
| I doubt that fits in the usage model for those pricing plans.
| They're priced assuming it's inconvenient and less used
| because of it. I keep hearing they're losing money anyways,
| so despite being triple or quadruple dipped you're still
| paying less than it costs to run the models.
| basch wrote:
| How would it cost Kagi anything, if I bring my own keys and
| all the costs are offloaded to my personal Google/ChatGPT
| account? I pay them the $10/month and get the Unlimited Pro
| access (but only to models I subsidize the cost of.) If
| anything it would save them money to offload my usage to my
| account vs using up some of their Flash tier quota.
|
| It would be ideal for them for LLM access portability to
| let them offer higher end models and have the end consumer
| pay directly for the usage.
|
| Id much rather pay for one AI License, and a small fee to
| each service I use, rather than paying a high tier AI Bonus
| price at every single service.
| macrocosmos wrote:
| I think they might be talking about the cost to the model
| providers.
| basch wrote:
| Then Google should offer Advanced Portable for $30 that
| includes being able to plug it into third party services.
| With some kind of policing to prevent it from being used
| as the entire backend to a service (for all users)
| itself.
| everforward wrote:
| Third party usage is too disparate for a single flat rate
| to make sense. Perplexity probably uses orders of
| magnitude more tokens than Kagi does (the former uses
| tokens on every search, the latter only does if you
| manually invoke the Assistant).
|
| Then there's the disparity in how many third party
| services each user uses. Some will use one, some will use
| 50. Google could charge per integration, but that's
| basically the status quo.
| basch wrote:
| Why would the number of integrations be the price point
| and not token tiers? I might want to connect my account
| to 100 services to test them, but only perform a couple
| uses each before forgetting about it.
| everforward wrote:
| I agree that makes sense, but it makes potential
| subscribers to the third parties nervous. I like Kagi
| Assistant because my payment is capped.
|
| I get nervous plugging my pay-as-you-go API keys into
| random software because of the risk they rack up a $1000
| bill doing something I wouldn't have paid $20 for them to
| do.
|
| The other three things are that economies of scale make
| it cheaper for Kagi to buy a bajillion tokens, Google et
| al don't want to manage the customer side of things (what
| service ate how many tokens?), and service providers
| don't want you seeing their "magic" in your console.
| Seems like there's a lot of power in the system
| instruction side of things, and Perplexity probably
| doesn't want you seeing their prompt.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I really feel like the software model is going to start to
| break in a couple of ways in the near future.
|
| Instead of vertical software slices, many people are going to
| want their single "horizontal" agent that they pay for (e.g
| Gemini Advanced, Claude) and connectivity to all of their
| other services.
|
| MCP (which I personally think is a mediocre protocol, so it
| will probably win) as the glue for a bunch of services we
| OAUTH against and choose when our agents do/do not have
| access to certain tools.
|
| The idea of a "GPT" App Store from OpenAI was sort of right,
| but just wrong enough. We are going to have an App Store
| inside of our preferred AI platform and subscribe/connect our
| other services from there.
| basch wrote:
| I prefer identity as the top layer. Give me an identity
| portal that acts as an account manager, access to api
| layer, let me perform password resets, and let me avoid 2fa
| if I'm logged into my identity manager account. It should
| allow bidirectional control: both what services have access
| to my identity, and what services anything in my identity
| are granted access to access. Things like LLM, cloud
| storage etc should be obscured away from services so they
| can't tell my storage providers from one another. All
| access between services should cascade down from my
| identity portal.
| orand wrote:
| Who is going to pay for identity as a product and not
| just expect it as a free feature of another product
| suite?
| basch wrote:
| Why not both? Use Apple or Microsoft or a third party
| identity provider.
| heywoods wrote:
| Your intuition regarding the shift from vertical to
| horizontal integration is spot on!
|
| Sam Altman, in a recent Stratechery interview, detailed
| parts of OpenAI's future strategy that align with your
| prediction -- a persistent, personalized AI. He envisions
| users interacting with OpenAI not just through core
| products but also across other applications.
|
| Altman described a key part of the strategy: "...we have
| this idea that you sign in with your OpenAI account to
| anybody else that wants to integrate the API, and you can
| take your bundle of credits and your customized model and
| everything else anywhere you want to go".
|
| This system aims to create a portable AI experience and by
| virtue, would usurp the vertical software business model
| that has historically dominated the software economy. A
| horizontal play, that sits in the middle collecting their
| tidy sum of the pot will require a very compelling
| argument. That would require a low barrier to integrate for
| developers coupled with a value-add proposition that is
| meaningful and not possible for anyone other than the
| largest technology companies.
|
| As you know, it's sort of the Wild West of tech right now.
| OpenAI is looking to find a territory in the AI landscape
| and make their stake now, and I think this is the correct
| strategy. We have seen what being the first to market with
| a great product can do for the longevity and growth of tech
| companies - especially the consumer markets. They have the
| name recognition, forever embedded in the lexicon of the
| internet, and a great product vision that will lead to
| critical mass adoption that and what awaits them is the
| coveted moat, at least in the consumer market, that AI
| companies have been struggling to find out in the Wild West
| of AI.
|
| Altman mentioned wanting users to "be able to sign in with
| your personal AI that's gotten to know you over your life".
| This sign-in would ideally carry "your memory and who you
| are and your preferences and all that sort of thing" across
| different integrated services.
|
| The OpenAI SSO login will be the Trojan horse and later on
| the app developers will either be incentivized by OpenAI or
| compelled to integrate their products because of the
| compelling value proposition it would bring to bare with an
| integrated personalized AI assistant, complete with its
| memory and preferences.
|
| Lastly, I suspect this is one of the driving motivations to
| become a consumer hardware company as there is little to no
| chance that current players (Apple, Google, Meta) would
| allow the same 1st party access to their internal API's
| would be a requirement for what Altman has laid out for
| OpenAI moving forward.
| esafak wrote:
| The industry solution to this is to create an open
| standard for AI memory.
| freehorse wrote:
| I understand we some may want that, but why should
| everybody else want that? I operate in several contexts.
| I want some kind of models in one context and one in
| another. I want the AI to be contextualised within each
| use, not "personalised" on me. Yeah sure it would be
| great if it had memory within some project, but I would
| rather not have memory between projects or use cases that
| are irrelevant to each other.
| siva7 wrote:
| No question, the openai gpt marketplace/store was a birth
| failure and doesn't make much sense in hindsight anymore. I
| just don't understand why they don't pull the plug and
| admit it's a failure.
| fhd2 wrote:
| I wonder why the rollout is specifically over the weekend. I'd
| personally do something like that Monday to Wednesday rather than
| Friday to Sunday. It seems like the kind of thing that needs
| monitoring and quick reactions - can easily get expensive if
| something goes wrong.
| Maxion wrote:
| Possible that they see lower usage on weekends.
| lucb1e wrote:
| They're already limiting it to one country at first. If they
| want a slower ramp-up, they can show it to more and more
| users rather than working weekends. Not to rule it out but
| this would strike me as a strange reason
| zuzulo wrote:
| Lower WE usage. "Let's see if it crash"
| fhd2 wrote:
| Hm, maybe not lower per se (though I can believe that), but
| less critical (less likely to be work related)?
| deanc wrote:
| On the other hand a huge number of countries have the whole
| Easter holiday off. Plenty of time to read these articles and
| sign up to stuff.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Are they really going to need more than a couple people working
| the weekend to pause/rollback if something goes wrong? It's not
| like Assistant itself is new, just the broader access is.
| xigoi wrote:
| Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43723964
| greatgib wrote:
| Obviously I'm happy to benefit from being able to use most model
| "for free" in my paid non ultimate account.
|
| But I'm concerned that this will not rot the business model like
| that kind of thing happen for other services.
|
| I would have preferred that the full of my subscription cost goes
| to the core feature of developing the search engine and directly
| the related feature. And as of today, I pay a separate premium if
| I'm interested by the AI assistant.
|
| Now, with it being in all subscriptions, and knowing that anyway
| they can only work by paying the token price per request to all
| AI providers, it means less of my money going to the search index
| improvement, and what I'm more worried is that a forced increased
| of the subscription price in the coming years.
|
| Something like, as you know, our costs are high, so we need to
| raise the pricing to stay sustainable.
|
| Even if not the best reference, this remind me of Netflix saying
| look we are adding "videogames" (that no one wants) to your
| subscription for free, but now we will have to raise our prices,
| because you know, inflation and all of that ...
| bayindirh wrote:
| From my experience, Kagi always prefer to "trickle down"
| features to lower tiers . First they removed search limits from
| some plans without increasing the price. Now they're allowing
| to use the AI assistant, _if you want_.
|
| The gist is, when you don't use the AI assistant, you still pay
| the base price, and that money goes to R&D, since your
| subscription money doesn't go to AI providers in the first
| place.
|
| For example, I have no interest in AI assistant, and I won't
| use it. As a result, my support will Kagi won't change.
| TekMol wrote:
| "Privacy by default"
|
| I don't know. To me, requiring me to give them my email and then
| having all my searches associated with that email is the opposite
| of privacy to me.
|
| Yes, Google, Bing, Perplexity and Co could do fingerprinting and
| _try_ fuzzy matching to cluster my searches. But at least that
| would be fuzzy and against the law in many places. While with
| Kagi, every search of mine would be clearly labeled as coming
| from me.
| dharmab wrote:
| There is a feature where you can search anonymously, using
| IETF's Privacy Pass standard:
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
| TekMol wrote:
| That looks super complicated. And hard to tell if the
| cryptography works as intended.
|
| Why would I go through all that hassle if I can just type my
| query directly in other search engines?
| dharmab wrote:
| I mean, it's pretty easy to use. It's a toggle switch in
| the UI.
| TekMol wrote:
| If it is a switch in the UI, then that is just trusting
| the site.
|
| If you trust companies with what they _say_ they do, then
| why not enter your query in any search engine that does
| not require a login? Afaik none of them say that they
| will try to apply fuzzy fingerprinting to cluster your
| searches into a profile.
| hobofan wrote:
| Honest question: Is private search achievable with your
| worldview?
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| Because the other search engines offer no privacy and
| relentlessly track everything you do across the internet?
| TekMol wrote:
| How do you know they do that? And how do you know Kagi
| does not?
|
| Whatever the engines secretly do, why would I use one
| where on top of that I have to actively tag every one of
| my searches with my email?
| eitland wrote:
| > How do you know they do that?
|
| Because it has been widely discussed for years.
|
| > And how do you know Kagi does not?
|
| Because the source code of that feature is open and you
| can look into it I guess
| TekMol wrote:
| > Because it has been widely discussed for years.
|
| That Google does fingerprinting across searches to
| cluster them and pinpoint them to a person? Are you sure
| you are not confusing this with cookies? Cookies are
| under my control. I can decide to not store them or just
| delete them.
|
| > Because the source code of that feature is open and you
| can look into it I guess
|
| You can't know what source code that is running on the
| server which you send your queries to.
| eitland wrote:
| I think it is interesting that you think everything
| Google does is kind of more ok just because you think it
| is limited to cookies while simultaneously being
| extremely skeptical towards Kagi, not giving them the
| slightest benefit of doubt.
|
| > You can't know what source code that is running on the
| server which you send your queries to.
|
| Based on my (admittedly cursory) reading of the ideas
| behind it, the idea of the IETF standard they implemented
| is that one does not have to trust the server.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| yes, even if you clear your cookies:
|
| https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/google-
| now-al...
|
| i quote: "With all these pieces of information, it's
| possible to create a unique fingerprint by which websites
| can recognize you, even if you clear your cookies. They
| will even be able to make an informed guess if you visit
| the same site with a different browser."
|
| i urge you to consider how google makes money. it's not
| at all surprising really.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Aha has this person never seen the JS google/CF run for
| bot detection?
|
| The browser APIs spit out so much info about the host
| system on demand and that doesnt even consider the other
| tricks they use.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Duckduckgo and yandex are search engines.
| fancy_pantser wrote:
| Maybe their privacy pass is useful then?
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
| mrtesthah wrote:
| Unfortunately the assistant officially does not work with
| Privacy Pass, for some inexplicable reason.
| flexagoon wrote:
| How is requiring an email "the opposite of privacy" when making
| a one-time disposable email takes like 5 seconds?
| Wilder7977 wrote:
| Don't give them "your" email. Give them a mail alias, which I
| am sure as a privacy conscious person you already have, and you
| are good. They also recommend to do so themselves.
|
| However, the most important argument here is not the fact that
| they are legally bound to those privacy commitments (they are),
| but that their business incentives are fundamentally
| incompatible with tracking users. For a very niche business
| with an extremely narrow and homogeneous user base, if they
| would get caught doing so, it would be game over. The privacy
| pass feature is available if you don't trust, and you can
| verify since everything relevant happens client side.
| qwertox wrote:
| I was given a free month of Kagi to test, and it had so many
| rough edges that during the last days of of the trial I was
| already using Google again.
|
| Notable issues for me:
|
| - maps (from Mapbox) are really bad. Sluggish performance and
| lack of information
|
| - barely any info boxes
|
| - no translation feature ("grundonnerstag englisch") gives me
| links to leo.org (which was a cool site in the 00s) and to other
| sites, but Google gives me a translation box with the result
|
| - no timezone calculations: "10 am PT" in Kagi: "= 10 Pt am
| (metric petaton attometers)" in Google: "10:00 Freitag Pacific
| Time (PT) entspricht 19:00 Freitag in ..."
|
| - no search history, which is sometimes really useful to have
|
| Other than that, the search results are really good.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Other than that, the search results are really good.
|
| I'm confused why anything else would matter. For example, I'll
| readily admit that Kagi maps sucks compared to Google maps. But
| I just use Google for map stuff, and use Kagi for searching. It
| doesn't seem like a big deal to me that it's a tool which does
| one thing and does it well.
| qwertox wrote:
| Because all these things improve efficiency. They give you
| the result at one glance.
|
| With good search results I refer to those which normally take
| you to sites, not just quick lookups like time zone
| conversion or translations. For example results which point
| to documentation or GitHub.
| msdz wrote:
| While I'm aware this is a case of "you're holding it wrong" -
| !translate <phrase> should do the trick. And that's not an
| excuse for not having better detection for when an info box
| should exist, because they do have them, especially for, but
| not limited to the WolframAlpha integration stuff. (For
| example, a friend and fellow user was awed when searching
| "internet speed test" and saw it integrated, no idea if Google
| has that too though).
|
| Other than that, make sure your region/locale is set correctly
| (I'm not getting the metric petaton, for example), and for
| everything else, they have an excellent feedback forum for
| suggestions/bug reports.
| hobofan wrote:
| > make sure your region/locale is set correctly
|
| Last time I checked (which admitedly has been a few months,
| but I haven't seen anything in the changelog/announcements
| that make me belive things got better), that's not a viable
| option.
|
| I always keep it as "International" (luckily that's an
| option!), as setting it to "German" significantly degrades
| the results as for e.g. technical topics it will rank many
| rubish German results higher than they should be. Google
| still has a significant edge in getting the distinction right
| between regional and technical expertise and how they relate
| to language.
| hobofan wrote:
| I think those are all perfectly valid points. As a Kagi early
| adopter they don't weigh as heavily that they ultimately make a
| difference, but it also feels like most things that are not AI
| related are not receiving that much attention nowadays, which
| is a bit disheartening to see.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| When did you try it?
|
| Because they have been working on all those issues. They even
| have their own translation now.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Kagi not saving search history is a big selling point for me. I
| don't want yet another tech company keeping tabs on me.
|
| And I wouldn't care if they dropped maps, I pay for kagi for
| search and the assistant.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I feel the same about their maps. I pay for Kagi for search
| primarily and assistant secondarily. I'm fine getting my maps
| from a different source. Not every service needs to be an
| "everything app".
| raffael_de wrote:
| > - no translation feature ("grundonnerstag englisch") gives me
| links to leo.org (which was a cool site in the 00s) and to
| other sites, but Google gives me a translation box with the
| result
|
| How about a custom Bang for dict.cc?
|
| Bang shortcut could be "dcc" with URL:
| https://www.dict.cc/?s=%s.
|
| Then you can translate using "!dcc grundonnerstag".
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I don't like how this was rolled out. I'm currently paying for
| "Unlimited Kagi Assistant" and the Kagi website STILL advertises
| "Unlimited Kagi Assistant". And they stealthily rolled in limits?
| I pay the same amount, but it's no longer unlimited, and I only
| know about this because I happened to notice it on HN. Otherwise
| I would only know after hitting a limit.
| louthy wrote:
| Fair-use limitations were always there. It sounds like they
| weren't actively enforcing it, but now they are because of some
| problem users. I don't think anything has changed for you
| unless you're one of the users this refers to:
|
| _Q: Why did Kagi start enforcing the fair use policy?
|
| A: The policy was enforced due to excessive use. For instance,
| the top 10 users accounted for approximately 14% of the total
| costs, with some individuals consistently using up to 50
| million tokens per week on the most advanced models. Our profit
| margins are already quite narrow. 95% of users should never hit
| any usage limits._
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I have no idea if I will be limited or not. I can see I have
| about 3 million tokens used per month. But I don't know where
| the limits are.
| drake_112 wrote:
| Kagi says they will charge the actual token costs of the
| underlying API's. They will hopefully make the actual
| calculation visible soon.
|
| If we make a quick back of the envelope estimation: in the
| outlier case if those 3 million tokens are mostly output
| tokens and you always used an advanced model like GPT 4.1
| which costs $8 per 1 million output tokens you would be
| close to hitting the limit that the plan provides ($24 out
| of $25 worth of tokens).
|
| In pretty much most other scenario's (including a higher
| proportion of input vs output tokens and mixing in cheaper
| models) you could be a long way from hitting the limit. For
| example if you used half of those tokens on GPT 4.1 Mini
| instead of GPT 4.1 you'd only be roughly halfway to your
| limit ($14 out of 25$ worth of tokens).
| freezingDaniel wrote:
| I wish they had first included/added a usage meter then
| the limit. If they had first given users a way to see
| their usage, users of the assisstent could know how much
| they have to worry about the change. As it stands I use
| up to 2m tokens per month but have no clue how much this
| amount of tokens (over various models) cost. And 5%
| hitting the limit and not having a way to just pay for
| usage past the limit (yet) is kind of dauntingI wish they
| had first added a usage meter before implementing the
| limit. If they had first given users a way to monitor
| their usage, users of the assistant could know how much
| they have to worry about the change.
|
| As it stands, I use up to 2M tokens per month but have no
| clue how much this amount of tokens (across various
| models) costs.
|
| And 5% hitting the limit and not having a way to pay for
| usage past the limit (yet) is kind of scary. Especially
| as I feel like I use AI more than my peers.
| gaiagraphia wrote:
| I'm really surprised that more people didn't jump on the
| unlimited usage of Claude3.7, tbh.
|
| Don't think it's fair to call users problematic when they
| were using the product as advertised. "Unlimited" has a
| meaning.
| louthy wrote:
| > Don't think it's fair to call users problematic when they
| were using the product as advertised. "Unlimited" has a
| meaning.
|
| I'm sympathetic to that argument, for sure, but it's also
| just a branding-label to not necessarily be taken
| literally. There must always be a limit to everything as
| there's only so much energy in the universe: so, the word
| 'unlimited', _in every real-world physical context_ , is
| still with limits.
|
| Read the T&Cs should always be the the advice.
| gaiagraphia wrote:
| Personally, I think it's a bit scummy to expect customers
| to trawl through T&Cs, when the company gets to sit back
| and chill, while profiting from using 'unlimited' front
| and centre.
|
| There's a subtle difference between using something for 5
| hours per day vs causing the heat death of the unvierse.
|
| Metred use, with all parties being informed and honest
| with wording, is the fair and ethical solution. I
| absolutely abhor how companies are allowed to change
| meanings of words, then run behind 'muh conditions' when
| they lose out on their gamble.
| louthy wrote:
| > There's a subtle difference between using something for
| 5 hours per day vs causing the heat death of the
| universe.
|
| Replace 'heat death of the universe' with 'the available
| funds of the organisation'. Nobody should be so naive to
| think that any 'unlimited' service is unlimited in the
| same way as there's an unlimited set of natural-numbers,
| or any other mathematically pure meaning. There are
| plenty of words where the precise meaning isn't used any
| more ('myriad' is one that jumps to mind right now,
| nobody uses it to mean 10,000 any more).
|
| I'm sure if there was a word that meant: "effectively
| unlimited for the majority, but there's a limit for the
| extreme outliers" I'm sure it would be used as an
| alternative, I don't know of one?
|
| I agree that the absolute upper-limits should be upfront.
| So the _local definition_ of 'unlimited' is clear. I
| believe that's what Kagi is moving toward, if I'm reading
| FAQ correctly.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If no one can offer unlimited then it shouldn't legally
| be able to make that claim. It's like putting cures
| cancer on your bread loaf and then changing the terms to
| say curing cancer means eating wheat; everyone should
| know it's a lie but it raises sales anyways.
| louthy wrote:
| What about words like 'Ultimate' or other commonly used
| branding words. Are you saying that no words except exact
| literal definitions must be used on all branding?
|
| I hate to break it to you, but I think the cat is well
| and truly out of the bag on that one!
| ipaddr wrote:
| Ultimate is a fair term as with most branding terms.
| Unlimited is a lie, ultimate separate offerings between
| basic and standard.
|
| You can't say you get 10 apples for a dollar and only
| give 9. You can say best, ultimate Apples because they
| are not quantifiable.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > I'm sympathetic to that argument, for sure, but it's
| also just a branding-label to not necessarily be taken
| literally.
|
| Sure sure sure, but I'm not abusing the "Unlimited"
| service. I'm just asking AI questions every now and then.
| I'm a normal user doing normal usage and I have no idea
| if I will be hitting these limits or not.
| zik wrote:
| In my country (Australia), companies have been found
| guilty in court when making that claim. It considered
| false advertising to claim your product is "unlimited"
| when it is not, in fact, unlimited.
| mppm wrote:
| Maybe they've changed it in the past hour, but as I write this
| comment the 25$ plan is called "Ultimate" and promises
| unlimited search, but not unlimited assistant.
|
| I agree about the need for appropriate wording and advertising,
| but other than that, the new limits seem entirely reasonable
| and in line with what other aggregators like Abacus and Poe are
| doing. The paid plans of the major AI labs themselves always
| have usage limits too. It simply can't work any other way if
| you include costly models in the mix.
| raffael_de wrote:
| Afaiu, with Unlimited you have more tokens available and more
| models to choose from.
| switch007 wrote:
| It's easier just to never believe a company whenever they say
| "unlimited". It almost always goes away. And never ever truly
| unlimited as they all have a legal caveat to terminate your
| services for whatever reason whenever they like
| haroldship wrote:
| How do I get this to work? When I try to access the Assistant I
| just get the help page:
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html
| j01 wrote:
| You have to login first.
|
| For some reason instead of redirecting you to login
| kagi.com/assistant redirects you to the wiki rather than a
| login page when you're not logged in.
| jacek wrote:
| It's right there in the article:
|
| > An important note: We are enabling the Assistant for all
| users in phases, based on regions, starting with USA today. The
| full rollout for 'Assistant for All' is scheduled to be
| completed by Sunday, 23:59 UTC.
| haroldship wrote:
| I missed that, thanks. I will try it on Sunday
| icoder wrote:
| Well in your defence, the HN title _does_ say 'available
| to all users'
| freediver wrote:
| Good point - how would you word the title?
| ploum wrote:
| Kagi Assistants to become avalailable to all users this
| week.
|
| I was also confused, the title is very misleading and US-
| centric.
| louthy wrote:
| Are you outside the US?
|
| _Q: I can not access Assistant!
|
| A: We are doing staged rollout beginning with USA, full rollout
| scheduled by Sunday, 23:59 UTC. This will include other regions
| and even the trial plan._
| haroldship wrote:
| I missed that, thanks. I will try it on Sunday
| VHRanger wrote:
| Should be out globally today actually
| ohghiZai wrote:
| Outside the US as well. You can get it to work now through a
| VPN. Not all models are available at the moment.
| gaiagraphia wrote:
| It'd be nice if you could see how much each request actually cost
| in relation to your plan, and to have some type of easily
| accessible meter.
|
| A lot of AI providers operate in black box territory when it
| comes to limits, which is quite annoying.
| moebrowne wrote:
| > We plan to display cost and interaction details more
| prominently soon, potentially on the billing page or directly
| within the Assistant interface.
|
| I too want to see this soon. As a long time user of Ultimate it
| isn't uncommon for me to use 5M tokens per month and I have no
| idea if this will be covered by my subscription now.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| How do you know how many tokens you've used? Or is it a
| guesstimate?
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| And what is the cheapest model to use? Llama 70B?
| VHRanger wrote:
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llm-benchmark.html
|
| gemini flash, 4o-mini, mistral small for super cheap
|
| qwen-qwq for strong models
| gaiagraphia wrote:
| The following should say your daily token usage:
|
| https://kagi.com/settings?p=consumption
| aktenlage wrote:
| Sounds good. I use duckduckgo's AI assistant a lot these days,
| which also guarantees that the data is not used.
| mocmoc wrote:
| Good idea 1 year later. Perplexity is on top of the game
| Zambyte wrote:
| I paid for both for close to half a year to see which one I
| wanted to keep. I decided to drop Perplexity in favor of Kagi,
| because Perplexity felt like it was trying to position /
| portray itself as a supernatural-esque Source of Truth, where
| as Kagi does a better job at letting you use the tools how you
| want.
|
| Perplexity is also much less flexible than Kagi Assistant. The
| most customization you can do on Perplexity is answer a few
| questions about yourself, and hope that the info you add is
| injected into relevant prompts (spoiler alert: hope isn't very
| powerful here). With Kagi, I created a lens about a year ago to
| filter search results down to sources I find useful relating to
| GNU Guix, which I use for my machines. When Kagi Assistant
| rolled out (I pay for Ultimate, so I have had this a while) I
| made an Assistant that only pulls search results from my GNU
| Guix lens. The practical comparison here between Kagi and
| Perplexity is that I can go to Kagi and search "!guixc How do I
| install nginx?" (or simply ask the question in the Assistant
| interface; the bang will bring me there from search) and I will
| get back the answer I want. I added info that I use GNU Guix on
| my Perplexity profile, and there is not a chance that my
| question would have been answered within the context of GNU
| Guix as I wanted.
|
| Perplexity is cool, but I found Kagi to simply be more useful.
| VHRanger wrote:
| The difference is that Perplexity is subsidized by $0.5B in VC
| investment and are losing money.
|
| Kagi can only grow at the pace of incoming revenue.
| bwb wrote:
| how do you actually get it? none of the links work and I am a
| paying user...
|
| just takes me to documentation.
| moebrowne wrote:
| > We are enabling the Assistant for all users in phases, based
| on regions, starting with USA today. The full rollout for
| 'Assistant for All' is scheduled to be completed by Sunday,
| 23:59 UTC.
| bwb wrote:
| Thanks! I totally missed that, I wish they would announce
| when it is out rather than when it isn't :)
| lolc wrote:
| I've been wanting to try and see whether I can consolidate my
| phind.com and my kagi.com subs by upgrading my Kagi plan. They
| are kinda forcing me to try now :-)
| lolc wrote:
| I tried, and Kagi is better in some aspects like ease to edit
| questions. Haven't seen any a downside yet, and the option of
| creating multiple profiles seems interesting.
| shaunpud wrote:
| Why the f don't blogs have links to the actual homepage
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Kagi are one of my favorite companies. In a world where buying a
| T-shirt requires me to hand over my phone number ("in case we
| need to contact you about your order" - yeah, right) I find it so
| refreshing that kagi barely require any info from me except some
| form of payment.
| dewey wrote:
| I had to send them my address...for my free t-shirt ;)
| dgellow wrote:
| Great t-shirt quality btw
| hulk-konen wrote:
| Yes
| justinrubek wrote:
| At least you got your shirt. I waited for many, many months,
| where I consistently checked to see if they were out. They
| happened to release them during a very short window of time in
| which I didn't go to my email; I never got to have the shirt.
| dgellow wrote:
| https://store.kagi.com/
| jillyboel wrote:
| The shipping companies seem to demand it from the sender.
|
| But they never use it so just fill in a random number.
| numpad0 wrote:
| They do if needed. AliExpress at one point required my
| address to be in full UTF-8 representation that I wasn't
| comfortable with, what I assume to have been the post office
| called me twice without caller ID, and the package got
| "delivered" to random neighborhood of the airport hundreds of
| miles away.
|
| They don't call you if you live in a cleanly ASCII
| representable address with zero ambiguity and you don't have
| to be contacted from customs. Otherwise the courier do use
| the number.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| Is there a way to disable this? We have a strict no-ai policy.
| Even having it available will be an issue and I may not be able
| to use Kagi at work.
| spondyl wrote:
| As a user myself, I'm not sure. Assistant is a separate view so
| it's easy to never interact with it but yeah, I can see why
| that might be a work policy issue. You could try requesting
| that as a feature in https://kagifeedback.org. The team are
| quite responsive there and historically Vlad the CEO reads
| every post.
| Game_Ender wrote:
| Can you describe the why of the policy and if you are ok
| sharing the industry?
|
| I am also curious if you have other restrictions on information
| sharing, API usage, and what reference documentation to use.
| CubsFan1060 wrote:
| I unfortunately don't make the policies, or always agree with
| them. But, I do have to follow them.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Then you shouldn't have been using Kagi in the first place,
| because they've always had an AI summarizer feature
| available by appending a question mark to the query. So
| just like you can choose not to use that, which has always
| been there, you can choose not to click on Assistant and
| stick only to non-AI functionality.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Settings > Search > Manage search AI features
|
| Has the option to turn off Auto AI feature.
|
| It might be an good idea to post on their support forum.
| freediver wrote:
| Curious is it no AI or no LLMs policy? Search has used some
| form of AI since inception.
|
| Are you imagining one switch toggle that would disable it at
| the team account level (or individual account level - in which
| case it would theoratically still be opt-in and 'available'
| like it is now).
|
| Genuinly trying to understand the UX of it that would comply
| with the policy.
| ac29 wrote:
| FastGPT & Kagi Translate have been available for a while, so if
| you have a Kagi subscription you've already had AI accesss.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I subscribed to Kagi a month ago.
|
| It's great.
|
| I'd love for BlueSky takes a subscription model, too, so we don't
| have to think about advertising or sustainability or all that
| jazz.
|
| Also means the company's interests much more closely aligned with
| users interests, rather than advertisers interests.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| That's why I moved to a paid mail service myself. I used to
| have a free one, but it was always lurking in the back of my
| mind that they'd be selling me to advertisers. (Plus, the
| service sucked)
| scosman wrote:
| Okay - this is amazing. I'm a happy paying Kagi user. Getting to
| apply almost all of my payment towards for cross-platform tokens
| as a bonus - wow.
|
| This will replace a chatGPT and Anthropic sub for most everyday
| users. Their assistant is better than bringing my own keys to a
| client for most use cases. Just wow.
| snackernews wrote:
| I agree. I'm on the $10 professional plan and honestly if I'd
| received an email offering this for an extra $5 per month it
| would have been a no brainer for me.
|
| Please Kagi, don't take too much of a haircut or let paying for
| this eat into the core search budget.
| 34679 wrote:
| Kagi search is great, but I'm not willing to pay more than $5/mo
| for search and 300 searches isn't enough. I have no interest in
| Kagi AI. Adding more searches would've caused me to sign up
| again. A rate limit instead of a monthly limit would prevent the
| "search anxiety" that creeps in as your available searches
| dwindle. Make it so and you can have my money again.
| ndaiger wrote:
| I also use the $5/month plan, and the few times I have exceeded
| the 300-search limit, Kagi simply renews my monthly plan early.
|
| For me it's just happened a few times towards the end of the
| month and I was happy with how they handled the situation.
| ksec wrote:
| That is actually a really nice model. Effectively it is 300
| Search for $5 valid for one month. And instantly renew if you
| exceed $5.
|
| May be Kagi could also consider rolling over unused search
| for one month. So if you only did 200 searches, the remaining
| 100 will roll over to next month so you have 400 searches.
| mrweiner wrote:
| The unused searches likely subsidize the people who use the
| full 300.
| gretch wrote:
| At some point this is becoming a really roundabout way to
| implement 1 search = 1.67 cents
| lurk2 wrote:
| Do you mean that they charge you an additional $5 (so in a 12
| month period, exceeding the 300 search limit would result in
| 13 payments instead of 12), or does the next month's
| subscription payment get moved up to the day that you ran out
| searches, with the number of payments remaining the same?
| wyre wrote:
| They update your monthly subscription's bill date to
| reflect the reup on 300 searches for the date of the 301st
| search.
| lurk2 wrote:
| So they charge you an additional $5?
| wyre wrote:
| For every 300 searches they charge $5.
| lurk2 wrote:
| I suspect that Kagi's price point might be a close
| approximation of what these services actually cost to provide
| without being subsidized by ad services and data harvesting;
| free search can only really sustain itself under those
| conditions. Heavy users who block ads have been getting
| subsidized by other users for decades now, and this has led
| these users to expect these services to be provided at an
| unrealistically low price.
| 34679 wrote:
| If they can't scale 300 searches for way less than $5 in
| costs, they are doing something very wrong. Consider that you
| can get 1M tokens of inference for less.
| dymk wrote:
| You can get 1M tokens of inference because it's subsidized
| by VC money. The whole point of the parent comment is that
| this is closer to the actual cost to provide a service.
| lurk2 wrote:
| He could be right, I have no idea what search costs.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That $5 has to cover organizational costs, not just
| compute. There's 40+ employees, so salaries alone would be
| a significant chunk of their entire income if all of the
| 45k members were on the $5/mo plan.
| atmosx wrote:
| Yes, but don't twist it: it's VC money, greedy corporations
| and personal data exploitation that enabled all that. Not
| those who came to expect expensive services for free.
| akhosravian wrote:
| People like free and the "greedy corporations" found a way
| to give them what they want.
|
| Google search is trash now (for reasons that aren't
| entirely in Google's control), but for the first decade it
| was magical how well it could one shot finding relevant
| data on the web.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| $10/mo is very cheap for such a high-quality service.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It simply isn't worth servicing people who aren't willing to
| pay $10 per month. They are problem customers and frequently
| churn. Much better for your sanity and your wallet to focus on
| improving your offer for the people who are happy to pay.
| packetlost wrote:
| I've been paying for the $10/m for quite awhile now and it's
| one of the better QoL subscriptions I have.
| skrtks wrote:
| I'm usually cautious with subscriptions and regularly review
| what I'm paying for. That said, Kagi at $10/month has earned
| its place -- been using it for 20 months now and it's been
| worth every cent.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I'm curious about how you think about the "value" for a service
| like Kagi? What determines how much it is worth to you? I don't
| think that Kagi is for everyone, but, at least for my own
| internal model of value, Kagi comes out so far ahead, that I'm
| curious about alternate ways of thinking about value that don't
| see it that way (to be extra clear: I do not think that my view
| is the "correct" view or only view).
| dmos62 wrote:
| How do you think about its value? I too am interested in
| others' perspectives. I'm not the person you asked, but I
| rarely do more than "{query} reddit" or "{technology name}
| {documentation-oriented query}". Google, or any of its free
| competitors, work fine for that. On top of that I'm
| subscription averse: the only "digital" subscription I have
| is additional google drive capacity and a VPS, which together
| cost less than 10 moneys per month, and I'm fantasizing about
| canceling those too.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I 'm not willing to pay more than $5/mo for search and 300
| searches isn't enough_
|
| Most of the population is well served with search funded with
| ads and tracking. Kagi is for the minority who don't want that.
| I'm not sure there is enough if a market between 300 and some
| other number that would treat search anxiety just to satisfy
| those who won't pay $60 a year more to relieve it.
| fiatjaf wrote:
| For most very simple use cases -- like, I don't know, if you want
| to know how to sort a list in Kotlin -- just using the Kagi in-
| search assistant is more than enough, you can search with: "sort
| list kotlin, code example?" (with the question mark) and you'll
| get brief explanations with code examples based on search results
| (or whatever. I don't know, it works).
|
| The model they're using for these must not be a very good one,
| but for most things it's enough, and very fast.
| diggan wrote:
| I'm not sure how to access this, both the link in the top right
| inside Kagi and from "The direct link to the Assistant"
| (https://kagi.com/assistant) from the docs, just lead me back to
| the same docs page. Anyone know what's going on and seeing the
| same issue? I'm on the "Professional" if that matters.
| moelf wrote:
| they're doing a rolling out, so try again later.
| seth_at_kagi wrote:
| Hey - We're doing a phased rollout over the next few days.
| Currently we've rolled out to all US regions - and we plan to
| enable more very soon! (as soon as today - if everything seems
| right!)
|
| We'll also be sending out a toast message to everyone once it's
| globally rolled out.
| lawn wrote:
| I love Kagi and it's easily worth the money.
|
| I even use an Ultimate plan to try out the different models but I
| use it so rarely that it's probably better to downgrade.
|
| I wonder, what's the upside for the Ultimate plan now? Just
| better models?
| g42gregory wrote:
| How is the different from 3.7 sonnet connected to the web search?
| Or Gemini 2.5 with search capabilities? Am I to rely on Kagi
| being better and capable of continuing to be better than frontier
| models at search?
| hairofadog wrote:
| It's a front end for all of those models. I haven't signed up
| for it but I'm considering it as I pay for both Kagi and Claude
| for a total of $35/month, whereas this would be $25 if I
| understand correctly.
|
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aboxwithrocksinit/test-buc...
| freediver wrote:
| Difference #1 - Flexibility - in Kagi you choose any model you
| want to work with, not just models from one company
|
| Difference #2 - Quality - Kagi Assistant uses Kagi Search.
| Ultimately, model quality will converge to the same place,
| quality of search results will remain a major difference.
|
| Difference #3 - Privacy - Using models through Kagi is more
| privacy respecting due to non-training for API calls.
| rglover wrote:
| This is a great deal. Switching to Kagi was like getting OG
| Google search back. I'm also blown away by how good it is. I used
| DDG but was never really happy (always had to go back to Google
| for certain things).
|
| Love that for $25/mo, you can get access to GPT 4o, Sonnet, and
| other models along with high-quality search.
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